Mostly about my art journaling journey

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I’ve been continuing to work on more pages for my 2011 Travel Journal. Luckily I had kept quite a lot of pamphlets, maps etc from our trip, and since the journal is a loose leaf one in a ring binder, I can add lots of pages retrospectively. I alsokept a brief diary of all the places we went so it has been easy to write about it. I have enjoyed this process so much,reliving memories of that trip and designing pages to celebrate each place we visited that I’m thinking of making my next travel journal in a similar loose leaf format so I can keep adding to it after the trip is over. This prolongs the pleasure!

Anyway, without further ado, here are the pages I have done over the last few months.

These are all in France, Provence, Carcassonne, the Dordogne, the Loire. I’m still working on the Paris pages.

I have been working on my travel journal in between sight seeing, whenever I get a chance. So far I have two main problems….surprisingly .it’s really hard to find places to get photos printed. And two, my darling husband wants to be out sightseeing all day everyday just about, so it’s difficult to get long stretches of time needed for art journaling. But as you can see, I have managed it a bit.

The journal I have is A4 landscape size so when I photograph a double page it’s very long and skinny. I tried taking the pages separately as you can see, but really they are meant to be seen together.

Keeping an art journal definitely enriches the journey for me. It’s fun collecting pamphlets from the Information offices, and looking for pictures and postcards I might want to include. On the left here I have made a pocket from a photograph and put our tickets to the Utrecht museum inside it. The postcard of the old cathedral painting is just attached on one side so you can flip it back and the writing continues underneath it. Nifty huh?

For this Amsterdam spread I used a serviette printed with a 16th century Dutch still life painting on the right hand side and I really like the effect. I am enjoying using a combination of postcards, ephemera and photos that we have taken.

The backgrounds I had already prepared are coming in very handy now, many of them already had paint and some scrap paper borders, so all I had to do was stick in a photo or postcard and write something.

However I know there are a lot of totally blank pages coming up late in the journal!

I have also done a few pages based on our time in Brittany (we are still there) but I will post them tomorrow. It’s been a long day. And if I may whinge about the weather for a minute, it’s still very cold, and also rainy today. I’m sure we will have better weather next week in Tuscany. Love to you all in blogland.

It’s summer holidays here, and I’ve been spending some time working in my travel journal. So far, since my last post about this journal here I’ve finished the pages covering our journey to Saverne and Strasbourg in France and on into Switzerland.

Some pamphlets we picked up are stored in a pocket made from a postcard from the Bosch museum.

I employed the Azza technique again here on the right page, cutting up 3 photos to make a gothic window shape I used a bit of walnut ink around the edges of the page to give an aged effect. Love that walnut ink!!

We were lucky enough to catch this wonderful English choir in an old church near Saverne. They were certainly the best choir we heard on the whole trip…the English really know how to do choirs!

We drove from Saverne in France to Romanshorn on Lake Constance in Switzerland in one day. On the way we diverted up a mountain to see the Chateau of Haut-Koenigsbourg.I made this background using a new stencil by Michelle Ward that my darling husband gave me fro Christmas. First I painted 2 pages with yellow ochre blending into cobalt blue, then used blue, green and yellow spray inks through the stencil. Then I ripped some fleur de lis scrapbook paper to make a border. I loved the effect of the ripped patterned border so much I used it again on a few more pages. On the left page I used a photo I took to make a pocket to hold a pamphlet from the castle. This is my favourite page so far from this journal, I LOVE everything about it.

A double page devoted to Strasbourg, where we explored the cathedral and took a boat tour. As you can see I used another fleur de lis scrapbook paper here. I visited a few scrapbook stores in my area and bought every medieval/baroque style paper I could find.

I painted the next 2 pages with yellow ochre and red oxide, and printed out a map from google maps of our itinerary from Saverne to Romanshorn. There’s a pic of the city of Konstanz in the centre which flips over separately.

Here it is again with the central photo flipped over. Now you can see the old door (from 1322!) and the library of St Gallen, which has many beautiful OLD manuscripts and books.

We drove over and through the Alps to the Italian part of Switzerland and stayed in Bellinzona which was gorgeous. I had forgotten to print out any photos from this part of the trip, so I put together a montage of 3 photos on the left page, the 2 in the background I made pale. I used a pale green damask patterned paper for the background on the right and tore a border with it on the left. That walnut ink came in handy again around the edges.

Over and through the Alps again to Grindelwald, a beautiful valley surrounded by snow capped peaks. The left page is a map I picked up in Grindelwald and the right page another Azza style of cut photos. I had yet another fleur de lis patterned paper that I used to make a border and tie the 2 pages together. There is some of Gerrit’s writing (in Dutch) about Grindelwald on the left page. I have not really written a great deal in this travel journal, just a few lines here and there. Partly because it all happened over a year ago now and partly because I have so many photos I want to use. When I travel again this year I expect to write a lot more, as I intend to be making the journal as I am traveling.

I still have all of our 4 week trip through France to go in this journal! I don’t know whether I’ll get it all done or not..in any case I quite like what I’ve done here so far. Thanks for listening, blessings to you all in blogland.